Paperback:
Published: Lightning Books (April 2025)
ISBN: 9781785634055
The Inalienable Right
Adam Macqueen
£9.99
In the age of AIDS and Section 28: a secret that could change political history
It is 1987, and Tommy Wildeblood has put his days as a Piccadilly Circus rent-boy long behind him. Slightly to his own surprise, he is now a rookie teacher at a South London comprehensive.
But when Margaret Thatcher’s government launches a chilling attack on the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality in a new law known as Section 28, Tommy can’t stay silent – especially when he realises he may have information about one of Thatcher’s key lieutenants that could change the political situation completely.
Forming an uneasy alliance with a sharp-elbowed tabloid journalist, and delving deep back into his past on the ‘Dilly’, he puts everything on the line – for both himself and his old friends – in a desperate bid to expose the truth.
With his trademark blend of historical research and ‘what if’ fiction, Adam Macqueen captures the spirit of a frightening age in another spellbinding case that lifts the lid on the Eighties political establishment’s murkiest secrets.
OUT APRIL 2025. AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER NOW
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‘Wildeblood is a thoroughly likeable hero’
Mail on Sunday
‘The kind of book I wish I’d written’
Jonathan Harvey
‘Macqueen has created a really memorable main character: brave, clever and brimming with moral indignation, but also vulnerable’
John Preston, The Critic
reviews
Praise for the Tommy Wildeblood series
‘A wonderfully evocative walk on the wild side of 1970s London, Beneath the Streets is darkly comic and deeply moving. A breathtaking, heartbreaking thriller’
Jake Arnott
‘Really well done. The detail and the authenticity is all there: London as a really scary, edgy, ugly place. The atmosphere is brilliant... As a portrait of a world I thought it was really fantastic, and I also read it with my computer by my side because I was constantly looking up the real-life figures and I was constantly shocked and amazed by how much of this is true’
David Nicholls
‘A f***ing fantastic read. A gripping what-if thriller, packed with vivid period detail and page-turning twists. To find myself actually making an appearance in the final chapter was just cream on the cake’
Tom Robinson
‘A page-turning mystery, skilfully plotted and filled with tension, Beneath The Streets lifts the lid on 1970s subculture to spine-tingling effect’
Paul Burston
‘A thrilling and brilliantly imaginative novel. It takes you into the secret world of Soho in the 1970s. But then suddenly it opens another door into the hidden world of violence and corruption that still lies underneath the England we know today’
Adam Curtis
‘A gripping thriller, interwoven with a really important thread about the condition of being gay in the 1970s’
Harriett Gilbert, A Good Read, BBC Radio 4
‘What if Jeremy Thorpe had succeeded in murdering Norman Scott? That’s the gripping premise behind this smart story of corruption, murder and establishment cover-up’
iPaper, 40 best books of the year
‘An accomplished and gripping continuation of Wildeblood’s adventures [in] a grim 1980s bedevilled by Aids, Thatcherism and IRA bombings. Cameos by everyone from Jeremy Corbyn to Derek Jarman add texture and wit’
‘Rent boys. Revolutionary communists. Frankie Goes to Hollywood. And a plot to blow up Mrs Thatcher’
Popbitch
‘Brilliant. Beautifully drawn. A superb final twist’
‘This rollercoaster queer thriller is a cracking read: a complex love story, an adventure racked with radical threat and emotional trauma, an on-point political history of 80s social anxieties and protests, and a stonking good who-dunnit and who-dunn-what’
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